If you want to dodge Christmas petrol price gouge, go electric

As the usual reports of petrol prices rising for the Xmas silly season start coming in – perhaps it is a timely reminder that if you owned one of the current crop of long-range EVs, your fuel costs are locked in for the time of your electricity tariff contract.

They are not subject to the weekly/seasonal fluctuations in the retailer’s choice of profit margin.

An interesting factoid here is that the recent average difference between the retail price of petrol and the wholesale one is 24.7c a litre.

That’s equivalent to the total off-peak per kWh rate for many households.

(BTW: 1kWh of electricity will get a Renault Zoe approximately 7.5km according to its Green Vehicle guide sticker energy usage. 1L of fuel will get you approximately 14.3km at 7L/100km).

The Renault Zoe EV will get you 7.5km for 1Kwh for electricity. Source: Groupe Renault

Simply put – the fuel profit margin alone will get your EV half the distance that one litre of fuel at the price of $1.40 (91RON ULP) would get you today.

Added to the simple fuel cost savings an electric car can get you: you also have the savings of no oil changes, engine tunes and filters, plus vastly longer brake replacement intervals.

Well it won’t be long before the Hyundai Kona Electric, Nissan Leaf and Tesla Model 3 arrive to join the newly launched Hyundai Ioniq Electric and Renault’s Zoe and Kangoo ZE for around $50k choices. (Kona, Leaf and Model 3 are all slated for likely release during 2019).

Tesla Model 3
Hyundai Ioniq
Nissan Leaf
Hyundai Kona

You may therefore be stuck with paying exorbitant fuel prices this summer – but next Xmas may become the first time that the fuel retailers feel the pain as people vote with their feet to take-up EVs and avoid the queues and fuel price hikes.

Bryce Gaton is an expert on electric vehicles and contributor for The Driven and Renew Economy. He has been working in the EV sector for 10 years, and also is editor of the Australian Electric Vehicle Association newsletter.